The KDE Project is pleased to announce the availability of KDE
3.1 Beta 1 for your testing enjoyment. This release, which marks
the second testing release of the KDE 3.1 branch, offers many
improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0.x. New features include
improved OpenPGP handling in KMail, handy tooltips that provide
details of files in Konqueror quickly, and even new ways to be
less productive thanks to four new games.

KDE 3.1 also officially introduces the much acclaimed Keramik
style as the new default widget style. On the PIM front, this
beta adds LDAP support to KAddressBook and also an AvantGo
conduit to KPilot. In all, this release sports hundreds of new
features, bug fixes, and improvements, many of which you can read
about here.

To get KDE 3.1 Beta 1, you can download source code tarballs at your favorite
mirror site, or right here. Binaries for several distributions are also available, see the full announcement for details and download locations. Hats off to Dirk
Mueller for coordinating this release and preparing the release announcement. In addition, congratulations to
all of the hard working developers for putting together such a
large set of improvements!

I know this is a kde site and people will support their desktop, but you cannot be serious when you say that kde looks as good as OSX or Windows XP. Kde is still far behind both in the look and consistancy of the user interface. Neither Gnome or KDE will look as good untill X11 is replaced with a better windowing system or a new rendering model totally implemented. Many of the things that give the edge to WinXP and OSX are things that are just cannot be done with the current Xfree, such as real transparency. Untill things are changed, no Linux desktop can say they are better than WinXP or OSX. One thing that bothers me is how blind some of the Linux community is to what the real world wants. If you are trying to make a desktop that attracts everyday windows users, you'll need to focus on what they want. When Redhat goes out and tries to add consistency between Gnome and Kde, the Kde people go out and scream about how they are destroying their desktop when all they are trying to do is make a desktop enviroment with some consistency so that users can use the best apps from both desktops. The plain ignorance of some in the Linux community is what is holding it back from being a major player in the desktop market.

Well, just to say that I believe KDE 3.1 with keramik style IS nicer than MacOSX and WinXP even if it has less special effects. I also think that Everaldo's icons are the nicest there is on earth. More over, KDE is the most themeable desktop. And no, I'm not saying that because I use KDE. I have no problem to say that the former KDE default style wasn't as good as MacOSX one but was not far from WinXP one.

Xfree *can* handle real alpha transparency, and it is able to hardware accelerate this, before MacosX Jaguar came out.

On the other hand, MacosX and WinXP still don't have anything near the networking capabilities of Xfree (no, i'm not talking about vnc crap).

Btw, the end-user desktop is won by first winning the corporate desktop. Most non-techie people I know, don't switch an entire OS just because it is more stable, faster, cheaper, prettier. But they will switch, if their company switches to that OS.

It are things like stability, good networking and administration capabilities, speed, decent apps, sane licensing issues, vendor support, migration from previous software that are important for the corporate desktop. It does *not* matter if it has real transparency..

> On the other hand, MacosX and WinXP still don't have anything near the networking capabilities of Xfree (no, i'm not talking about vnc crap).

Third party software has allowed Windows (sorry, don't know much about MacOS) to have window-level networking capabilties since Windows 3.1. WindowsXP remote desktop sharing (built into WinXP-Pro, and sharable through WinXP-HE), can also be configured to do window (x11 style) as well as desktop sharing (vnc style).

> Xfree *can* handle real alpha transparency, and it is able to hardware accelerate this, before MacosX Jaguar came out.

And this has been built into the Windows GDI since Win2k came out, and has been hardware accelerated by Nvidia since the 10.x Detno driver series (which I beleive was the first to have Win2k support). Other vendors also have support (I'm almost 100% sure ATI and Intel on-board chips do), but I don't have any ATI cards anymore to check :(

I know this is a kde site and people will support their desktop, but you cannot be serious when you say that kde looks as good as OSX or Windows XP. Kde is still far behind both in the look and consistancy of the user interface. Neither Gnome or KDE will look as good untill X11 is replaced with a better windowing system or a new rendering model totally implemented. Many of the things that give the edge to WinXP and OSX are things that are just cannot be done with the current Xfree, such as real transparency. Untill things are changed, no Linux desktop can say they are better than WinXP or OSX. One thing that bothers me is how blind some of the Linux community is to what the real world wants. If you are trying to make a desktop that attracts everyday windows users, you'll need to focus on what they want. When Redhat goes out and tries to add consistency between Gnome and Kde, the Kde people go out and scream about how they are destroying their desktop when all they are trying to do is make a desktop enviroment with some consistency so that users can use the best apps from both desktops. The plain ignorance of some in the Linux community is what is holding it back from being a major player in the desktop market.

Umn, I definatly think that KDE (and GNOME) can look better than WinXP/MacOSX.

Remember that many people hate aqua, and in XP, they revert to the Windows Classic theme (win2000).

Now, KDE and GNOME are both *much* more customizable than XP or OSX out of the box.

X11 doesn't detract from the desktops any. It actually probably helps bunches. Now, it would be nice if X11 would support all of the special-fx capabilities of Quartz and the Windows GUI, but these sometimes actually make the interface *less* pleasing. The new version of MacOSX, Jaguar (10.1), actually scales back some of the effects by default.

I for one am sick of Keramik already. But there's no better alternative right now. I've been doing some Googleing, but haven't found anything pleasing. I'd love for my Linux desktop to look like this: http://www2.truman.edu/~d2550/desktoppic.jpg

I'm almost starting to believe that XP has nicer themes than KDE/Gnome/etc...

But no, that's not the reason for switching back to Winblows. I'll continue using Linux. Just with a bit of a jealous look at some people with awesome XP themes...

SuSE RPMs exist in unstable dir all right. Except that some of the dependencies seem broken. libart_lgpl.so.2 sits under gnome2 dir which rpm doesn't know anything about (so --force, but it's ugly), and kdeaddons package seems to be missing.

This seems to be an error in one of the konqueror plugins.
Either konqlistview (and/)or konqiconview causes this crash.

You can make a copy of your "old" directorys
[prefix]/share/apps/konqlistview and
[prefix]/share/apps/konqiconview,
then install the kdeaddon package of 3.1-beta1 and afterwards restore above directories again...

It is *really* nice to have a style that is not as boring as the previous ones and is not hard-to-use-each-day-übercool-and-wierd as enlightenment styles. In fact it is a really lovely one and one that makes us differ in look from other desktops.

Niot only is it more mature than Keramik, (over 1 year in development) but it is also faster, more customizable, completely themes KDE and it looks just as good if not cooler. I really think liquid should ahve been selected as the default. If Keramik didn't leave the gray parts and was a complete theme than, I would consider them equal, but the way it is now and with the *great new scrollbars* I really liek Liquid a lot more.

You sure? I could have sworn I read in one of the earlier kernel cousins that SVG support was being postponed to 3.2 because not all the features were supported yet. Something about not including it until it worked properly so that it didn't set peoples expectations wrong.

However, KC #43 also reitterates the SVG icon rumour. Unless one of the developers pipes up to say yes or no, we'll have to wait and see.

You're confusing SVG icon support and full SVG support. The code for supporting SVG icons is already in CVS; what was postponed to 3.2 is code for full SVG file support - KSVG; the difference is that icons use only a small set of functionality of full SVG -- they don't use JavaScript scripting and animations, for instance.

Hi.
Is anoynone else experiencing problems with the new beta1 SuSE 8 rpm's?
For example:
- I can not configure or display 99% of the usual toolbars, there's no URL field, no back button ...
- Kmail still has no Aegypten Plugins pre-installed?

The Alpha1 was working quite good, hope it's just me causing this trouble. :o)

same here so you're not alone. Konqueror is absolutely unusable for web browsing because there's only 5 buttons on toolbar, menus are in wrong order etc. Seems like one or more rc-files are missing from packages.

Oh man, and I was just about to get started on my very own download manager project, because that's one of the very, very few (and constantly decreasing amount of) things KDE has been missing and I thought it would be a good first project to try. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to try to do one myself before 3.1 sharp releases, and not install any of these prerelases before... or I could just see if there perhaps are any features missing that I could try to add to the released version.... :) Oh well.... how often does it happen that a program from main KDE is not fully featured out of the box??? Great work, all you involved. I just hope I can come up with good new ideas, so that I can actually code something myself.

One feature that most people wants and the kget don´t have yet: download from more than one connection. Other features are find and select the best mirror, download a entire directory (pause and resume possible, of course) and, maybe, scan with a anti-virus. Too work to do. The first (more than one connection) is the critical one.
Thanks for the help. The KDE needs more developers.

She even asks me to replace her Windows XP with SuSE and KDE3, because KDE3 is "sexy" and Windows XP is "dumb". -- one detail -- it is only a year ago when she first started working with computers at all!

The only things that still confuse her are: manual mounting and unmounting and absence of her Adobe and Macromedia software she works with.